Exposure to phthalate metabolites, bisphenol A, and psychosocial stress mixtures and pregnancy outcomes in the Atlanta African American maternal-child cohort

Prenatal exposures to phthalates and life events stressors in relation to child behavior at age 4–6: A combined cohort analysis

“…Importantly, we did not capture participants’ subjective response to these life events, and while we evaluated maternal depression at the time of the child visit, we did not assess maternal mood in pregnancy. A more comprehensive measure of maternal stressors and affective symptoms during pregnancy could be useful in future work, and some studies have begun to adopt this multi-faceted approach to characterizing prenatal stressors ( Eatman et al, 2023 ). As in any observational study, there is the potential for residual confounding and while we adjusted for a broad array of covariates in a staged manner, there may be other important factors that were not accounted for in these analyses.…”

“…As a result, it is increasingly apparent that non-chemical stressors (such as PSLEs) may interact with chemical exposures (such as phthalates) to impact child development. To that point, a small number of studies have demonstrated that prenatal exposures to phthalates and non-chemical stressors may interact to heighten risk of preterm birth ( Eatman et al, 2023 ; Ferguson et al, 2019a ), while other studies in this area have examined joint impacts on maternal hormones of pregnancy ( Hlisníková et al, 2022 ) and children’s reproductive development ( Arbuckle et al, 2019 ; Barrett et al, 2016 ). Despite the strong evidence that prenatal stressors affect children’s brain development and behavior, to our knowledge, no study to date has examined phthalate-stress interactions in the context of child behavioral outcomes.…”

Sex-Specific and Trimester-Specific Associations of Prenatal Exposure to Bisphenols, Parabens, and Triclosan with Neonatal Birth Size and Gestational Age

“…We introduced three models (QGC, WQS, and BKMR) to help understand how coexposure to bisphenols, parabens, and TCS was associated with birth outcomes, and identify the key contributors driving the combined effect. QGC is developed to analyze the combined effect of high-dimensional mixtures on a single outcome, and changes in the outcome are presented by increasing all chemicals by one quartile simultaneously . Unlike the direction homogeneity demanded by WQS, QGC can flexibly assign a positive or negative weight to individual chemical based on the direction of the independent effects.…”

“…QGC is developed to analyze the combined effect of high-dimensional mixtures on a single outcome, and changes in the outcome are presented by increasing all chemicals by one quartile simultaneously. 48 Unlike the direction homogeneity demanded by WQS, QGC can flexibly assign a positive or negative weight to individual chemical based on the direction of the independent effects. BKMR is a nonparametric approach that uses a Gaussian kernel function to evaluate the mixture-outcome relationship, allowing for nonlinear and counteracting effects.…”